GeoCities to shut down on 26 October

Final curtain call for free website host

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8 October 2009 10:03 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Yahoo has sent an email to users giving final notice of the closure of its GeoCities service, shutting the door and turning off the lights on an early chapter in the history of the Internet. The site will be closing on 26 October, and from that date onward websites will no longer appear on the Web and users will have no access to their accounts.

GeoCities was the place where many people hosted their first website, as it provided easy-to-use tools rather than forcing people to work in HTML. It was also free, though ad-supported. Yahoo picked it up for $3.65 billion at the peak of the dot com bubble in January 1999, though the site then became gradually obsolete as it became easier to host websites manually.

In April, Yahoo announced the site's closure, and stopped accepting new registrations. The company has now given users a final notice that the site is closing, encouraging them to download their pages to their computer, or switch over to Yahoo! Web Hosting. The company reminds users that all GeoCities content will be deleted after 26 Oct.

Did you have a GeoCities site? How long has it been since you visited one? Let us know in the comments.

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